Condition of Mr. Segundo: Responding to the recent allegations concerning Bat Segundo and Vanessa Hudgens.
Author: Marianne Wiggins
Subjects Discussed: Fictive alter egos, Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, James Frey, Kurt Vonnegut, Hemingway’s screenplays, Edward Curtis, ephemera, patriarchy, W.G. Sebald, 20th century photographers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, truth vs. legend, “book time” vs. real time, photo manipulation, the similarities between Photoshop and Soviet propaganda, Abu Ghraib, novels as news source, literary antecedents, Absalom! Absalom!, disclaimers, dialogue, long em-dashes, the difficulties of writing novels in London, California geology, the exhaustion of writing measured prose, Las Vegas and Hunter S. Thompson, and bathtub symbols.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Wiggins: One interviewer said to me that he thought I wrote in the equivalent of jazz improvisation. And fortunately, given the luxuriant elasticity of the English language and our grammar, you can make all these elliptical riffs. You can put a dash in a parentheses and keep a whole thought going seamlessly, if — I mean, I hope the reader doesn’t get lost midway through the sentences and say, What? (laughs) Where is this going and what is this about? But my mind moves in that, with that rapidity. So it’s almost a musician’s notation more than a grammarian’s.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (